It took Corey Liao seven days to wrench herself free from her body.

The skeins of fascia and sinew lashing soul to body had been stubborn. She’d painstakingly scraped herself free, thread by thread, while silt enveloped her limbs and clouded her eyes and dragged her deeper. But she only fought harder, clawing and thrashing until she finally spun free from the gravity of her flesh, leaving her body in the unforgiving embrace of mud.

Her triumph lasted only as long as the trip up to the surface of the river. She dragged herself onto the bank of the Potomac, hair waterlogged and skin sloughing off her fingertips, soul still steeped in the memory of her demise.

She should’ve known better than to expect any help.

The only direction she knew was away, and she took the only path she had, up the riverbank and into the city.

It took Corey fourteen days to focus the nebulous shapes around her into some semblance of recognition. She lingered at the base of the broad staircase leading up to the National Gallery. Clusters of people gathered beneath its marble columns. A small band of high schoolers sat to the side, shoving the remnants of their lunches into their mouths. A woman with a sketchbook fluttered past, pulling her partner—clearly out of his depth but indulging her nonetheless—towards the door.

Corey turned away before the envy digging at her ribcage could claw its way through her chest.

The last time she’d been here, she’d stolen a couple of hours for herself to visit the Winogrand exhibition her boyfriend had forbidden her to see. She’d come anyway when work took him out of town. It had been years since then, but she’d never quite stopped feeling guilty about going behind his back, never quite free of the prickling dread that he’d find out.

Across the avenue, a lone figure leaned idly against a doorframe, burgundy-red beanie stark against the pale trim. The building stood only two stories tall, weathered brick at odds with the smooth white facades of its neighbors. A wooden sign jutting out at a right angle above the door proclaimed LAUNDRY in neat, if old-fashioned, hand-painted serif. Corey couldn’t help but notice the building, utterly dwarfed by the neoclassical buildings on either side, all the more striking for its lack of pretense.

The figure in the red hat waved at her.

Corey froze.

The figure waved again and disappeared through the threshold.

Wait, Corey tried to shout, willing her inert limbs to step forward, shuffle, twitch, anything. Please!

Between the flow of vehicles, the building flickered, hastening in fits and starts towards the present. Moments hung suspended from one car bumper to the next. A bustling business for one, two seconds. The next: the red-hatted figure on a ladder, removing the sign. A van darted in front of Corey, and the building went still, darkened windows gaping. A delivery truck zipped past; in its wake, a pile of red-dust rubble. Then flat limestone and evenly spaced windows rose before her, smooth and unyielding.

She had stood rooted to the spot, and because of that she’d missed her chance. Always unable to act until it was too late. Roadkill in the face of headlights. She crumpled into a heap by the side of the road. The memory of the river rushed in to whelm her. The concrete beneath her melted away into soft, sucking mud. Water filled her mouth and plugged her ears, and she remained as dumb and useless as he had always—

(On the first day, Corey Liao had died. Numbness had wrapped around each of her nerve endings; cold weight had pressed down on the back of her head. Had she even fought, or had she just let the water snarl its fingers in her hair, let its palms push her face down into the silt?)

But it wasn’t the river that pushed you down, was it?

The whisper pierced through the murk like a needle through a tapestry. Behind it fluttered a single, diaphanous thread. Corey dragged one arm free from the grasping water and reached for this lingering lifeline. The water bore down, attempting to claim her once again. She managed to twist the thread around her swollen fingers. With what remaining will she could summon, she pulled.

A murmuring trickled through: osseous waves lapping against velvet shores. Corey pulled again, widening the aperture the voice had punctured through the veil. The murmuring snaked its way into the recesses of her memory and tugged. Something reached out towards her. Corey reached back.

When her vision cleared, she was moving over land again. Her hair and limbs still sagged with sodden weight, but the river had retreated. She looked down at her hands. They held nothing but rivulets of silt crawling along the lines of her palm.

A streetlamp flitted by, a red post and pagoda-style lantern. The sound had pulled her north into Chinatown. Corey couldn’t fathom why. She’d had little reason to spend time in or even think much about this part of town. On a corner stood a concrete-and-brick apartment complex: a solid weight in the gloom, beyond which the domes of a synagogue peeked out. The murmuring pulled her towards a rowhouse across the street. The door stood ajar. Corey slipped through easily.

The cramped vestibule gave way to an even more crowded room lined from floor to ceiling with mismatched shelves crammed full of jars and bottles. Stacks of cardboard boxes fought with plastic bins for space on a floor lined by a thinning carpet patched together with duct tape. Corey stepped carefully around everything as though she still possessed any means to knock them over. A narrow passageway led to another door, through which the murmuring thrummed to the rhythm of a flickering light. Incense, chafing against her senses like sandpaper, drifted out from the room.

Four figures sat inside, hunched over a small table. Their hands swept in arcs over the felted surface, their muttering indistinguishable from the susurrus of talismans under their palms. A ring of candles surrounded them, the flame playing over their backs, softly illuminating one side while letting the rest fall into dramatic chiaroscuro.

Were they diviners, reading patterns in oracle bones? Corey thought of her parents casting poe blocks in front of a shrine, seeking answers in the orientation of two wooden crescents. (She tried not to imagine her parents casting poe blocks in front of a shrine, seeking answers about what happened to their daughter.) Whatever was going on here involved a lot more pieces. It had to be much more complex than yes or no.

Hello? said Corey experimentally. The figures did not respond. Nor could Corey understand them. Their words melded one into the next, an amorphous slurry sloshing about her ears.

The shapes on the table coalesced, edges resolving into hard lines and right angles: smooth blocks with rounded corners, polished bamboo on the upper face and ivory-white on the opposite. The figures began arranging the blocks into lines, two high and eighteen long.

Corey let out a soundless keen of frustration.

Mahjong! This was just a group gathering in someone’s back room to play their weekly game. The sound of chattering bones that had led her here was nothing more than tiles striking each other as the players shuffled them in between hands.

One of the figures stood up. She patted the pockets of her quilted jacket and drew out a burgundy beanie. Pulling it over her short-cropped white hair, she smiled broadly, crow’s feet etching the corners of her eyes, and motioned for Corey to take the vacated seat.

Wait, Corey said, grasping at the woman’s arm, but she winked out of sight like a candle blown out in the wind. Corey’s fingers closed on nothing. She whipped around to face the remaining players, spitting out a half-curse, half-sob that sank into the murk unheard.

The players chatted idly and crunched on bridge mix, their brightly patterned outfits standing out against the dark walls. Not one of them was under seventy. Corey swore she’d seen the same checkered blazer on the woman across the table on her own long-departed grandmother. Corey still couldn’t make out their words, but the conversation felt leisurely, as if merely meant to string together the moments until a fourth player showed up.

Fuck it, thought Corey, why not? She had nothing better to do. If the rules of mahjong were the only thing that made any sense in this place, she would play some damn mahjong.

She took the fourth seat.

At Corey’s right, a woman with elegant hands and a vest embroidered with peonies rolled the dice. The breaking point determined, the players took turns drawing sets of four tiles from the walls for their hands. Corey noted with bemusement that they drew for her seat as well, setting up sixteen tiles before her. They’d even left an orange, a bowl of shrimp crackers, and an ashtray within easy reach. Corey couldn’t tell whether the latter contained incense ash, cigarette ash, or both.

They played at a blinding clip, hands flitting over the walls like wings, fingers pecking tiles from the discard pile in the center. When it came to Corey’s turn, she attempted to draw a tile. Her hand slid off like it was coated in oil. She flung her arms back and forth across the table in frenzied sweeps, failing to upset even a single piece. Why should she have expected anything to happen? Useless, like always.

The player to Corey’s left, a white woman with pale gold curls peeking out from under a millefleur scarf, drew and discarded for her at random. Mouths moved as quickly as fingers—no doubt exchanging the week’s gossip, if Corey’s experience with her relatives was any indication. Tiles hopped from one hand to another. Trios of melded p’eng or ch’ih accumulated in front of each player. Fists thumped against felt in alternating bouts of elation and agitation, punctuating the sharp clicks of tiles. An exchange of sharp words, a quick swig of something from a glass, and the game continued.

East, south, west, north. Build, break, wash, repeat. Why couldn’t she have walked into an occult ritual rather than a mundane one?

Suddenly Checkered Blazer threw her head back in triumph and showed her hand. The tiles hit the table with a thud, less like wood on felt and more like a heartbeat in an endless cavern, resounding much more than it should have through the tiny room. It reached into the space between Corey’s eyes and tugged. Her ears popped. The rush of equalizing pressure sent her head spinning.

The players knocked down the remaining walls and began washing the tiles, the clack-clack-clack swelling and ebbing again. The sound buoyed Corey along, carrying her in mesmerizing waves, each crest bringing along a snatch of conversation.

“…says his daughter is trying to convince him to sell his house in the city and move closer to her in case anything happens…”

“…swooping in and trying to buy up property around here again…”

“…got a bichon recently, yappy little thing…”

Peony Vest nudged the cylinder on the wind indicator a quarter turn. The character for South disappeared into the block, and West rose to replace it. Corey now sat West during the West Wind round. How lucky for her. She should expect a big windfall if she won this hand.

Checkered Blazer closed her hand around the dice. But instead of casting them, she looked straight at Corey and said, “Well?”

All gazes fixed on her. With a start, Corey realized that their faces had pulled completely into focus. The murk enveloping her had evaporated, seared away like fog under a sunbeam. The space resolved into a small, poorly-lit room covered in cracking wallpaper.

They looked so pedestrian, thought Corey, like they could easily be any one of the revolving door of aunts and uncles and great-thises and great-thats her parents had introduced to her when she was ten, the summer they’d dragged her to Taiwan instead of letting her go to camp with all of her friends. The same summer she’d begrudgingly learned the rules of mahjong for lack of anything better to distract her from the muggy, mosquito-laden air, even as she hated the players’ raucous laughter and the smell of smoke suffusing every crevice of the too-small Taipei apartment they shared with her maternal grandparents.

Her grandmother had told her that the sound of shuffling tiles resembled the chattering of sparrows. Corey had asked if sparrows ever stopped gossiping, which had earned her a reprimand about respecting their guests.

Something coiled tight inside her, and Corey banished the memory.

Checkered Blazer exhaled a plume of cigarette smoke and cleared her throat. “Suzanne didn’t give up her seat so you could gawp at us. What’s your business?”

“Oh don’t rush her, Ah Hao,” said Floral Scarf. She drew a tile and placed it at the end of the row facing Corey. “She’s only just manifested. I’m sure we’re the first people she’s been able to talk to in a while.”

To Corey, she said, “You don’t mind if we play while you find your voice? Just point at the tiles you’d like to discard.”

It was Corey’s turn to stare. The players stared back expectantly.

She glanced at her hand and pointed at a hung chung. Floral Scarf pinched it delicately between two fingers and set it among the tiles in the center.

With that, the rhythm of the game resumed. It stuttered whenever Corey’s turn came around. Should she break apart a pair of wind tiles to make way for more flexible suit tiles? But she could only ch’ih discarded tiles from the player whose turn came before her, while she could p’eng from anyone at the table. It wasn’t as if she had the means to discuss strategy with anybody when her only method of communication was to wave vigorously and point at the tile she wanted.

Whenever she took too long, she felt the others’ impatience boring into the top of her skull. Corey’s relatives had exuded the exact same agitation whenever she played too slowly. How comforting to know that even across the distance of eight thousand miles, fourteen years, and fourteen days into the afterlife, elderly mahjong players could still make her feel like she was holding everyone back. The very same embarrassment, cut with annoyance, crept up Corey’s neck as she avoided eye contact with everybody at the table.

The woman she now knew as Ah Hao tossed a nine t’iao into the center. Peony Vest crowed in delight, “Fang p’ao!” She snatched the nine t’iao and slammed it down next to her, then tipped over the rest of her hand. She smirked, triumphant, and held her palm out towards Ah Hao.

Ah Hao slapped the hand away. “Not much of a victory when Dana’s been feeding you tiles this whole time.”

“Stop your whinging. You always make us sit across from each other. Now pay up.” Her wedding band, metal and inlaid wood, caught the light as Peony Vest waggled her fingers at the other woman.

Ah Hao grumbled something under her breath as she counted out her scoring bones, then smacked them into the victor’s hand with more force than was strictly necessary.

“Before you start your bragging, Mengyao, don’t forget we have a visitor.”

Mengyao favored her with a flippant grin before turning her attention towards Corey. “Don’t mind that old grump. What can we do for you?” The three began building their walls again, lining up their tiles without so much as a glance downward.

The water in Corey’s throat churned and frothed, but did not part to let her words through.

“Nod or shake your head, then.” Her own wall completed, Mengyao started working on Corey’s. “Your death. Was it accidental?”

Corey shook her head. Dana tossed the die, the players drew their tiles, and the round resumed.

“Murder, then?”

Corey nodded. Mengyao drew a tile for her—a lone west wind—and Corey motioned for her to discard it.

“P’eng.” Dana retrieved the west wind and placed it next to the two she revealed from her hand. “Do you know who did it?”

Corey pointed at the nine tong Dana had discarded, and nodded again.

“Is anyone looking for you?” Mengyao asked as she revealed seven and eight tong from Corey’s hand and nestled the nine between them.

Corey hesitated, then slowly shook her head.

“Not even your family?” Something must have changed in Corey’s expression, because the woman quickly added, “Your friends?”

(Why was she spending so much time with them? Wasn’t he enough for her?)

Corey could feel her hands making motions to pick at the felt, a habit from life that didn’t quite translate to her current state. Her fingers slid off the surface like water off a lotus leaf.

“I tol—” The word sloshed, gurgled. She sucked in a breath, trying to forget the grip of water in her lungs. “Told them all to leave me alone.” She kept her gaze on the table. “To stop contacting me.”

“And why,” said Ah Hao, “would you tell them such a thing?”

Corey flushed hot, then electric; embarrassment followed by the static prickle of indignation. She hadn’t needed to die to realize that something had been wrong with her life, the entirety of it narrowed down to the task of placating one person, of every decision revolving around whether or not it would upset him. But death had granted her an acute and unwelcome clarity about the last few years of her life. And now this woman, scrutinizing her through the haze of her own smoke, thought she had any right to judge?

“You think I’m stupid,” Corey ground out.

The air crackled. The slate-gray hairs running down the sides of Mengyao’s face stood on end. She smoothed them down primly and ran her hand down the back of her head to tame the hairs escaping from her bun.

“You think that I didn’t know something was wrong,” Corey continued. “That I should’ve left him before he—”

(Fingers snarled in her hair, cries muffled under the surface, water and mud snaking down her nose and throat and seizing her lungs—)

Corey choked. The charge in the air fizzled out.

“Like I said: don’t mind that old grump.” Mengyao patted where Corey’s hand ought to be. Corey wished desperately that she could clutch that hand. “We can talk about something else. Or keep playing,” Mengyao offered, the latter accompanied by a hopeful tilt of a shapely eyebrow. “What’s your name?”

Corey cleared her throat, and said carefully, “Corey.”

“Well, Corey, you wouldn’t happen to have a three t’iao in your hand that you don’t need, would you?”

Ah Hao snorted so loud that ash flew off the end of her cigarette. “Absolutely shameless. Keep it in your hand, Corey. And don’t discard that seven t’iao, either.”

Corey eyed the three t’iao and seven t’iao in her hand. She was fairly certain her relatives couldn’t see ghosts, but they and these three appeared to have the same supernatural ability to read her mind. She pointed to a five wan.

Mengyao sighed dramatically and drew. “You’re such a spoilsport.” She slid a pai p’i in front of Ah Hao with the air of a picky child pushing peas off the edge of her plate.

Ah Hao didn’t take the bait. She opted to change the topic. “Those lackeys from Blueslate finally got around to trying to strongarm me into selling this place.” She barely glanced at the one tong she’d drawn before tossing it into the center.

“Ah Hao, why don’t you ever give me anything I can use?” Dana sighed. “They left with all their limbs intact?”

“But not their dignity, I imagine,” said Mengyao.

Dana dropped a three t’iao into the pile. Mengyao immediately snatched it up.

“P’eng! Thank you, dear.”

Ah Hao seethed.

“Let’s invite everyone they’ve solicited over for dinner,” said Dana, cutting off whatever expletives Ah Hao had prepared to describe their collusion. “Hear what’s been offered, make sure we’re all on the same page.”

“And we’ll be playing Hong Kong style, right?” Mengyao nudged a six wan in front of Ah Hao.

Ah Hao glared but accepted it with a begrudging “ch’ih,” then slapped down a four wan. “As long as you two aren’t sitting at the same table.”

“A couple of detailed nightmares about the properties they’ve been eyeing wouldn’t hurt, either.” Mengyao tapped a manicured finger against her chin. “Walls made of rats? Giant sinkhole opening up along Sixth?”

Dana eyed the four wan. “Cockroaches with dolls’ faces?”

“What exactly do you do here?” Corey blurted, then shrank back as she realized she’d asked a little too loudly.

Mengyao hid a smile while Dana laughed. Ah Hao snorted.

“Solve problems. Sell imported goods. Host legendary potlucks.” Ah Hao took a swig of the amber liquid in her glass. “Our people always do a little better when there’s a few wu around to nudge things in the right direction.”

“But there’s no one left here. It’s just a facade now.” Corey wasn’t sure why she was arguing with the only people who had offered to help her, much less see her at all. Perhaps arguing was the most normal thing she’d been able to do for a long time.

“No one is a bold claim when right over there,” Ah Hao gestured towards the door, indicating the concrete building across the street, “live a few hundred of us.”

Dana drew and added a fourth west wind to the three already laid out in front of her. “You found your way here, didn’t you?”

Corey didn’t respond, instead pretending to consider her hand. “And the sign next door advertising a ‘Spiritual Advisor’? Is that you too?”

Mengyao laughed, an oddly delicate trill. “No, but we’re friends,” she said, and left it at that. “Did you want that eight tong? Or did you have more questions for us?”

The words came out in a rush, desperate to be spoken before Corey could lose her nerve. “I was killed. By my boyfriend. I don’t think there’s anyone looking for me. He knows how to… to cover his tracks.”

The murk wavered at the edges of her vision. She suppressed the rising flood of water in her lungs, just long enough to speak the name of the man who’d murdered her.

Mengyao let out a hiss between clenched teeth. “Demon.”

Ah Hao clicked her tongue. “Demons,” she said, “are an entirely different thing.”

“Oh, don’t be pedantic,” Mengyao returned crossly.

“I’m just saying, if we were actually dealing with a yaokuai and not some two-bit bastard who thinks he’s smart enough to get away with this…”

“I can pay,” Corey offered, croaky but surprisingly still audible. “I don’t have much, but I’m sure I can come up with something.”

Ah Hao didn’t miss a beat. “Your bones.”

“My what?”

Ah Hao leaned back, crossing one arm over her torso and resting the opposite elbow in her hand. “Not all of them. A slice out of your tibia. Or your scapula, if you want to be traditional about it.”

“You don’t have to say yes, dear,” Dana assured Corey.

Ah Hao rolled her eyes. “I can see why Mengyao does all the haggling.” Dana smiled sweetly. “We’ll help whether or not you say yes. But we need human remains to do what we do. Better to ask than to take.”

“How would you even…?”

“That’s our problem, not yours.”

Corey recoiled at the idea of giving away something so inviolately hers as a piece of her own body. But the thought of not giving these women something in exchange for their help was just as objectionable. She didn’t want to take something for nothing. She didn’t want to feel like she owed them. She refused to add another loose thread among the dozens from her life she would never be able to resolve.

Besides, what use did she have for her body now?

“It’s yours.”

Ah Hao picked up one of the flower tiles laid out in front of her. “Hold out your hand.”

Corey did so, bemused. “You know it’ll—”

Ah Hao dropped the tile. The whip-crack shock of its hitting Corey’s palm squeezed a startled yelp out of her, sending her reeling back into the chair. Twenty days spent drifting about in an untouchable state and this sudden weight burned, like the tile was searing a hole straight through her palm in its effort to obey the call of gravity.

“That one’s Suzanne’s. She’s the one who led you here.”

Corey thought of the smiling woman in her burgundy beanie and her whisper like a beacon through the fog.

“Her bones will link you back to the living world—and to us—for a short while. You’ve got seven days to do what you need to do. Come back to us if you need help.”

Corey closed her fingers around the tile, gritting her teeth against the pulsing heat of it. “I think I can manage.”

~~~

On the twenty-first day after her death, Corey watched the recovery crew pull her body from the river. She didn’t linger.

She drifted downtown and let herself into the lobby of an office building where the news played from a monitor. Her own face smiled out from the screen: an old college photo, several years out of date. She left as the anchor somberly asked the public to come forward with any information.

That night, Corey waited at the edge of the water, clutching the plum flower tile to her chest. She ran her fingertips over the blossoms of the bush beside her, reveling in the frisson of her nerves when she stroked the sprays of white flowers.

He walked down the path, unsteady. Corey could practically see the fog of inebriation hovering around his head. He had killed her, and he was getting drunk on a Thursday night. He got to choose to dull his senses to the world, while he had forced her to wander the afterlife deprived of hers, alone with her grief and fury and the knowledge that he’d steadily sawed away at every thread connecting her to the world for years before he decided to end her life.

She stepped into the water and called his name. His head snapped up. She called again, then let the water cover her head to wash the taste of it out of her mouth. He stumbled towards her, hands raised in fists, flickering between rage and confusion and terror, demanding she show herself.

Corey reached out of the water and pulled him under.

~~~

She didn’t attend her own funeral.

~~~

On the twenty-eighth day, Corey returned to the rowhouse. Her seat was waiting for her, the prevailing wind already West. The three wu raised their glasses in greeting the moment she sat down. As Corey held out the flower tile, it fell through her fingers and thumped gently onto the felted table.

“Something interesting happened yesterday,” said Mengyao as she arranged the tiles in her hand. “The primary person of interest in a shocking murder was found dead.”

“Tripped and fell face-first into the canal,” Dana said, hand over her mouth as if aghast by the details. Her wedding band, metal and inlaid wood, shone in the candlelight. “How unfortunate that he got himself hopelessly tangled in a chokeberry bush and couldn’t extricate himself before he ran out of air.”

“Drowned in the Grand Old Ditch. What a tragedy,” Mengyao said as breezily as if discussing which of their pantry items were running low. She discarded six wan.

“Should’ve been in a puddle of his own piss,” Ah Hao grumbled, not exactly under her breath. “Ch’ih.”

Mengyao sniffed. “We’re witches, not miracle-workers.”

Corey pressed her lips into a thin line as she studied her tiles. She couldn’t pretend that she was satisfied, exactly. But she had to admit that it was preferable to allowing her murderer to live his life while her body decomposed at the bottom of the river. He deserved what he got, and it had felt good to drag him under, bring him down with her, make him feel a fraction of the fear he’d made her feel.

But it didn’t make what happened to her any less unfair. Now that he was dead—

A chill suffused the air. “Can he find me?”

Ah Hao tugged her blazer more tightly around herself. “Of course not. We made sure of that. People like him are never welcome among us, in life or in death.”

~~~

On the forty-ninth day after her death, Corey found herself back on Sixth Street. Seeing past the murk was easier, still, when she was in this part of town. Ah Hao sat hunched over on the stoop. Rust bloomed in patches on the metal railing. Corey could see now that the rowhouse too showed its age, white paint on the facade flaking away to expose crumbling mortar underneath.

Ah Hao peered down through her bifocals at a small, ivory-white object clutched between her fingers. An extension cord trailed from beyond the door to the Dremel balanced like a pencil in her other hand. The bit whirred. On Ah Hao’s side of the veil, a nearly imperceptible spray of fine dust; on Corey’s side, the luciferin glow of yearning, the ache of a body calling out to a soul it hadn’t yet forgotten.

Ah Hao’s eyes flicked up at Corey’s approach. The wu nodded by way of greeting before returning to her work.

“You can still see me?”

Ah Hao declined to answer the obvious.

“Is that…?” Corey gestured at the tile clutched between Ah Hao’s bony fingers, not quite able to bring herself to finish the sentence.

“Mm-hm.”

“How?”

“Like I said: our problem, not yours. If it’s any consolation, nobody will notice. I’m very precise.”

Corey decided that she didn’t need the exact details.

“You’re free to move on.” Ah Hao tilted her head to the side, reminding Corey of a heron eyeing something small and tasty under the water’s surface. “Unless you’ve got other business.”

Corey hesitated. She considered asking what her tile might be. Five t’iao? Eight tong? Or an honor tile like fa? She found herself partial to the idea of being the wind indicator. As long as she wasn’t a scoring bone—that would be awfully on the nose.

Ah Hao ran an experimental thumb over the surface of the tile. “Suzanne couldn’t make it this week. Something about a great-grandchild’s recital. I told her they wouldn’t even know she was there, but she couldn’t be swayed.” She shrugged. “While she’s listening to the kid torture notes out of an oboe, we’re down a player.”

Corey shifted from one foot to the other. “I could take her spot.”

She thought she caught a glimmer in Ah Hao’s eye as the old woman pushed herself to her feet, the wrinkles at the corner of her eyes deepening as she gathered her tools. Corey followed her across the threshold, past the shelves and into the back room, wrapping herself in the sounds of clattering tiles and chattering sparrows.

___

Copyright 2026 Angela Hsieh